


A Hundred Bottles of Beer

by florahart



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (sappy ending), Happy Ending, M/M, Phil in the Army, Phil recruits Clint, Phil swears like a soldier, fortune teller, neither of them is good at feelings, not entirely AOS compliant, stops before events of Winter Soldier, temporary (canon-compliant) death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 08:25:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1598207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Phil was a young man, a fortune teller at the circus told him he'd face death a hundred times.</p><p>He didn't believe her, until, upon reflection on the evidence, he kind of maybe did.</p><p>And then he met Clint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hundred Bottles of Beer

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of those fics where an idea of somewhat mediocre merit showed up in my head, but then would not leave me alone, so writing it had to be a thing.
> 
> When I changed computers my copy of Libre Office apparently decided that spellchecking is no longer a practice in which it wishes to engage (harrumph! what is this tomfoolery!), so while I have read through for sense and typos, still, I am even more sure than usual that some moments of ridiculousness will have slipped through. Feel free to point at them if you are so inclined.
> 
> There is nothing in this fic that I think requires a warning type of tag, but if you disagree and think something that isn't tagged should be, you're welcome to tell me.

It started with what Phil would realize later had been a lucky-as-shit headshot and the light-headed stomach-churning celebratory aftermath.

Or, it started a long time before that, he realized even later, but that wasn't for quite a while yet, and he was young.

He was twenty-three and newly in the field; he'd done a bunch of languages and shit along with marksmanship because ROTC meant officer training and eventually he was supposed to call the shots, but while he'd had plenty of theory on paper as well as physical practice--this was what all the drills were for, obviously--combat was new, and somehow, because his luck was _shit_ , he'd drawn a fucked up mess for a first go. Marcus had said it was supposed to be a cakewalk, not that the army was real big on coddling the dumbass babies just because they were new, but instead, well. The term FUBAR wasn't all that adequate, and in the space of about fifteen surreal seconds they had gone from 'hunky-dory' to 'Harris in two or more pieces, Williams down with a gusher from the femoral artery, and Park out cold, although as he was still definitely bleeding, at least he wasn't dead'. Phil had hunkered down, taken stock, and tried (failed. failed so hard) to call up the calm that was so fucking important to making a tight shot, and then, hey, no good choices, and Przechek was too far over to see around the car, so he popped up and took the much less tight, much more exposed, but never the less effective, shot.

One shot, one dead bad guy, and then Przechek had popped two others out of Phil's line of sight, and everything had gone quiet.

Phil had taken from this the conviction, later to be confirmed many times, that cakewalks did not exist. Ever. If you were walking, and there was some expectation of cakeness, something was about to explode, burn, shatter, or enter a dimensional rift, or several or maybe all of the above.

So when they'd gotten back to base, with Williams' leg unlikely to stay on (but Williams himself not actually dead yet, so all in all, a win) and Park nursing a fucker of a headache and double vision and nausea he was denying for all he was worth (the stumbling and vomiting were kind of giving him away), Phil had reported in as ordered, debriefed for all of thirty seconds (things went boom, Harris got dead, the bad guys got dead marginally later, and then we all strolled back to base at a sprint jesus fucking christ), and then gone to find a beer.

It was ...not good, the shitty beer they had available, and as this was the desert in the summer it was roughly the temperature one might typically associate with a soothing broth for a cold, but it was a beer, and Phil had found himself mashing the can flat under the heel of his boot and keeping it in his duffel like some kind of fucking souvenir of the time the guy next to him found his ass and his bellybutton on opposite sides of the road.

In his life, he would end up with worse souvenirs, but before this, mostly what he'd collected was Captain America paraphernalia. Which was not to say he didn't still collect that too, but it was pretty thin on the ground on this side of the world, and everybody needed a hobby, right?

\--

Along about the time he mashed and kept his sixth can, twenty months later in a camp notable for nothing but a lot of dust somewhere south of Kirkūk, he decided maybe they were more talisman than souvenir, and when he kept the label off an honest-to-god bottle on leave at Landstuhl the following spring (by which point he'd developed such a taste for shit beer he barely appreciated the various stouts in steins off base when he went, and the label was for a lousy PBR), well, that made a nice round ten, and he sent them home in a box to his dad with a note that just said, mementos, they have stories, don't chuck'em.

Dad had souvenir boxes of otherwise meaningless items from both Suoi Bong Trang and Lang Vei, and Granddad had what was probably actually a jewelry box, the contents of which Phil had never seen, from Germany. Phil figured his beer talismans were safer at home than in his bag, anyway, and besides, it was as good a way as any to let his dad know without saying, without breaking operational boundaries, that he was fine, transport to Landstuhl notwithstanding. It was a flesh wound. Ish.

Also, it got the bunch of cans and labels out of his bag; Marcus had given him shit about the PBR, and Phil wasn't ready to tell Marcus to fuck off. Not yet, or at least, not with any heat to it. Telling him to fuck off casually was, of course, a daily event, regardless of his relatively senior position, and fortunately for Phil and his apparent utter inability to clean up his mouth, it turned out the Army was full of foul-mouthed motherfuckers, and no one took umbrage unless he insulted their mamas. And even then the umbrage mostly went to returning the compliment.

\--

By the time he had 25 cans and labels from 25 instances of times he came within shouting distance of an up close and personal introduction to the art of dying, he'd started sort of, but not actually, humming another verse of the stupid song-- _take one down, pass it around, 75 bottles of beer on the wall_ \--every time he added to the set, right before he took the first sip. Which, naturally, meant he was skewing heavily toward bottles over cans where he had the choice, because no one kept _cans_ of beer on the wall. He was just finishing his third tour by then, and it occurred to him that if he was at 25 now, he was going to run out of beer bottles way before he was forty at this rate because it was working out to one every coupla months.

And that-- _that_ \--was when he remembered the fortune teller. He'd thought it was just weird at the time, on a miserably hot day in a close moist tent set up just outside of town. He'd been eighteen, sore from all the shit he'd been doing to make sure he didn't embarrass himself the first time he reported for training, and just ready to head off to college five days later, when for reasons he didn't quite recall he'd been persuaded to take his sister, age ten, to the circus for their last outing together. And Priscilla had somehow convinced him to get their fortunes told, because clearly she had inherited their mother's irrefutable persuasiveness gene. Phil was good at getting people to do stuff; Pris was showing early signs of utter genius. 

So: fortunes. Hers had been nothing particularly memorable--something about second chances and missed opportunities and true love.

His, though, had been completely different, spoken in a strange ringing tone while it felt like the air in the room turned a sunny and poisonous yellow (it hadn't; the instant the words ended the air was fine and Phil was unsure how to proceed except to stand, take Pris's hand, and leave). She'd said some things about friends and indecisions, about leading and following, and about choosing a path with care. And even now, he could remember the closing words exactly: _One hundred times you will face death. Each of those times, someone close to you will meet it when you do not. On the hundredth time, your heart will be broken, and you will fall._

Which he didn't believe, obviously, because that closing sounded like some sort of bastardized Sleeping Beauty/Beauty and the Beast mashup (shut up; Pris's skills had been honed on getting stories read, and he was enough older that he'd been the target of choice a thousand times) except that... given his life now, and what he'd been though, he was pretty sure it was true. More or less. Everything about why he was here, why he'd followed Marcus into a system with which he did have philosophical issues stemming from, among other things, the stories he'd heard all his life from his dad, why he'd stayed when it was clear there was work to be done, all of that matched up with the strange chanting tone. And he _had_ been shot at a shit ton of times. He'd put it out of his head after the fair, and with a shudder he tried to do so again, but all afternoon and into the next day there he was remembering it, like there was nothing he could do to make it leave his mind, like it was somehow settling in to stay. Probably forgetting for a decade and then remembering incessantly was part of the fucking _magic_.

Magic. Like that was a thing.

Also, just what he needed: a creepy fucking reason to feel like he was dancing with destiny every day of his life. Fuck. Phil had looked at himself in the crappy dirt-flecked mirror in the showers and rubbed his hand down his face, then finished soaping his chin and throat to shave and thought about what to do with this (ridiculous) information that wasn't going to get him drummed out of the service for being fucking insane. 

He concluded that the only way out was through (which was how he'd been going about his life anyway, so it was hardly a new decision), but that he did need to screw his head back on straight one way or another, so it was time to reassess where he was. Just a little. He told Marcus he wanted to get a couple more qualifications in--he had the right, with his record and situation, to take some training rotations besides the ones that were assigned, and he decided to do it.

Marcus, because he was a bastard and an asshole, let him have everything he asked for, then called in the favor four months later by pressuring Phil to join him in Rangers training as well. 

All levity aside, fucksakes, he'd said he wanted more training because he wanted to _slow_ the rate at which he was creeping up on a shortage of bottles, not because he'd wanted to be the guy that went in when FUBAR was a long-past happy dream and every mission was a good goddamn day to die. Fucking Marcus.

"But you know you're the guy, Cheese," Marcus said. "You know you're a gifted motherfucker, and I don't like when the gifted squander their talents on midlevel bullshit when they could be saving the world one clusterfuck at a time."

And when he put it like that, thoughts of friends and leadership and choosing one's path aside, Phil had to admit he did have something of a reputation.

He was even learning the time and place for exercising his vocabulary (that place, for the record, was never in a room with Marcus. Marcus was some kind of fucking savant when it came to profanity). And he was never going to feel good about not taking the route that would save the world, which he knew, and Marcus knew too and would definitely play off of it if he said no, was entirely the fault of his Captain America collection, or at least, the qualities that had drawn him toward the guy's story in the first place. Damn it.

\--

So Phil became a Ranger and then there he was, thirty-three years old and nearly sixty bottles down, and goddamn, he needed to cool his jets because living fast and dying young sounded all well and good until you got to the dying part, and at this point his considered opinion was that dying was more an old man thing, and he wasn't anyfuckingwhere near _old_ , and didn't plan to check out early, fuck no.

Conveniently, Marcus, who had ditched the Rangers early when he lost the eye but still kept trying to run Phil's fucking life, decided just right about then that it was once again time for him to have a new career. Which would have been great except for how it was another career in world-saving. Bigger world, bigger clusterfucks, and, and this was a direct motherfucking quote, “bigger, badder, shinier guns to keep them out of the presence of any deaditude.”

Phil argued for a year and a half that deaditude was not a word. Finally Marcus gave him a look that suggested he was experiencing distress at Phil's complaint, then told him he was beginning to doubt Phil's commitment to sparkle motion. Phil had no fucking idea what that was supposed to mean, but Marcus, who expected him to somehow remember to call him Nick Fury, what the shit, apparently he'd been _involved_ with this spy business longer than Phil knew and was way up the ladder already, just grinned bigger and gave him mission after mission and test after test, promoting him up the line quicker than anyone else. Phil was a little worried this was going to end in resentment from his fellow agents, but it was true, he did have a background that those who had not come up through any long-term and/or elite military service did not, and no one--well no one but Winston over in Logistics, but his opinion was of no consequence to Phil--seemed to have an issue. 

\--

And then Marcus-scratch-that-Fury sent Phil off to do some hocus pocus in St. Louis with a kid who could shoot the eye out of a flea at two hundred yards with a blowgun, never mind what he could do with a--and here was the (probably, in retrospect, belated) point at which Phil began to doubt _Marcus's_ commitment to _sanity_ \--bow and arrow. So there he was in St. Louis with bottle sixty-four in his hand and a lump over his eye as he stared down the kid with the bow.

Well, no, not _still_ with the bow. Phil had taken away the bow, because it was bringing him into the presence of deaditude.

The kid was zip-tied to an old-school radiator between a pair of uninspiring windows in a studio on the tweltfth floor of the building on whose roof he'd set up camp. Phil had felt-slash-heard the zing of the arrow going past him as it tagged his ear when he turned to check a sightline, watched a second one bury soundlessly into Korschaek's throat on the other side of an ugly brown T-bird, and, on a whim, “staggered and fainted,” complete with rolled-back eyes, into an alley that took him out of the only possible line of sight of both positions. Then he got up, jumped for the little decorative ledge around the top of the first floor, and went in a poorly-covered window and straight through the apartment to the stairwell. His building wasn't as tall as the one from which his shooter had tried to pick them off, but he was hoping for a convenient fire escape or some damn thing, and in any case if the shooter was running or generally on foot, Phil felt like he kind of wanted the high ground.

In fact, he got lucky with the fire escape. The kid was just far enough down that Phil's trip to the roof's edge didn't immediately draw his attention. He had his bow slung over his shoulder, so Phil aimed for the middle of it, into the meat of the upper arm where it'd suck, but it'd heal, and then--and for fuck's sake, there's doing ridiculous shit in combat and then there's leaping from a roof onto another building's fire escape; probably if his goal was to slow his roll on the whole beer-bottle game, this wasn't the way. Anyway, yes, Phil leaped, the kid went in a window, Phil followed, there was a bit of hand to hand in which the kid demonstrated he absolutely could fight with a hole in him (see: the goose-egg over Phil's eye; see also, his phone, which took a lethal chop from a very sharp knife somehow in the proceedings), and finally Phil wrestled him down, checked him thoroughly for additional knives and other projectiles, and hitched him to the radiator, although as he caught his breath he admitted very quietly to himself that could have gone either way.

And then Phil went to look in the apartment's 'kitchen' wall for anything cold from the freezer, and against all probability, the tenant had four kinds of beer in the fridge.

Along with not much else, so Phil had another glance around. Decent TV, couple nice chairs, bed in the corner with a half-open drawer in which if Phil wasn't wrong (he wasn't) were a handful of condoms and couple of sex toys. No other touches of home were apparent, and Phil shrugged and took out two bottles of the beer, opening one to drink and putting the other against the swelling knot on his head as he sat down and contemplated the fact that he was holding captive a known mercenary in the crappy apartment some douchebag kept for, apparently, the sole purposes of entertainment and sex. Not that these were mutually exclusive. Whatever.

The kid was awkwardly holding pressure to the bullet hole with the swollen, probably broken, hand that was bound only to his own neck--knotted to strangle if he pulled the hand far away--because Phil didn't want him bleeding to death but also didn't want him escaping, and glared at him as he first hummed the bottle song quietly because it was good to maintain one's traditions even under trying circumstances, then sipped the beer for a while, and then took the label off and pressed it flat. It was a decent beer, and the label was one he hadn't had before, so he took a minute to fold it neatly before he put it in his pocket.

The kid was watching him, eyebrows quirked a little in puzzlement. “You keeping a souvenir?” He finally asked, sullen and rasping.

“What?”

“Of nearly getting dead?” 

Phil gestured at the slice across the tip of his ear and the knot on his head. “This?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, why not. Half the guys I know celebrate this shit with meaningless sex, but that's not my style, and nearly getting dead is as good a reason as any to keep a collection, don't you think?”

“What do you got against sex? I mean, seems like a waste.” The kid ogled Phil a little, then smirked when Phil didn't dignify either the question or the ogling. “Fine. You sing the song every time? Because, I mean, I ain't heard that since... I don't know when.”

“Since a few minutes ago, I suppose.” Phil arched a brow and took another sip.

“Asshole. Before that.” The kid considered, eyes narrowed. “What bottle you on? Your line of work you have to be at, like, fifty? Halfway to the end—that's why you keep 'em, huh?”

Phil blinked. Then blinked again.

Then he rolled the other beer bottle to a colder side. “Something like that.”

The kid whistled. “Better cool it off before you burn it out, dude. Hundred's not so far away, and ol' Maggie had a way of bein' right.”

Phil started as he tried to figure out where this was going, without much success. He checked that the kid's hands were still where he'd left them (they were), and then shook his head. “Can't say I know what you're talking about.”

“Oh please. No way they sent you without they gave you whatever dirt they got on me. Which shoudn't be _that_ much because I keep it to the shadows 'n shit, but you gotta know about Carson's. Plus, now that I got a reason to, I _remember_ you.”

“Remember me?”

“Yeah. I see shit. It's what I do. Well, and then I shoot it, but first I gotta see it.”

Phil nodded slowly. “But... the circus? How old are you?”

“Fuck you, old enough. Maggie freaked people out, mostly because she was scary good if it was guessin', which it wasn't. Your sister still a firecracker?”

Phil raised an eyebrow. “Sister?”

“Maybe seven or eight years younger, blonde, didn't want to hear about true love that day any more than you did?” 

As Phil had never in his recollection even mentioned the general content of Pris's fortune to anyone, he felt the hair raise on the back of his neck. “You have a lot more intelligence than _my_ intelligence would suggest. Also, whether or not I have a sister--”

“Pssht. She's not my target and I got no reason to think she ever would be. Also, what I have is _intelligence_ , like, my own, asshole, in my _brain_ \--I told you, _I remember you_. No tricks. Anyway. My arithmetic says you got only about halfway to go, and you don't look _that_ old. So.”

Phil considered whether he was hallucinating, or had been hit harder than he thought. Because remembering and sort of half-believing the fortune teller and her weird little chanting-voiced doomsaying, that was one thing. Having a conversation with a stranger about same as though it were a true and valid prediction, and a thing he needed to worry about, that was something else. Superstition was fine, but only while it was private.

Or something. He shook his head again. “Either way, carnival stories are no basis for life decisions.”

“Yeah, whatever, they sure's fuck are for _my_ life choices, what with how they're, you know, who I am. But go ahead, pretend it ain't real. Hey, you probably oughtta try to dig this shit outta my arm. Ain't gonna stop bleedin'.”

“And they you'll try to escape, which will probably end in more fighting--”

“Nah. Not that I won't try if I can get out clean, but you and me, we don't fight again.”

“Oh, don't we?”

“You got more'n forty goes left? She only never gave me nothin' that precise.”

“Ah. So the odds are in my favor, then.”

“Well. Till you get to 99. Then I might take a crack if you ain't killed me yet beforehand.” The kid grinned, showing bloody teeth where Phil's elbow had split his lip in the tussle. 

Phil rolled the beer can on his forehead to another new cool spot and tried to imagine how the fuck he was going to write the paper on this one. 

Somehow, he was pretty sure the kid--the mission notes had a name for him, but they hadn't exactly been introduced--wasn't going to make it, or anything else, easy. “You got a name?”

“Psssssht. You know my name, part of the story, right? For the record: Barton. Clint Barton. What's yours?”

“Coulson.”

“Nice to meetcha, then. Hope to keep on talkin' but first: bullet?”

Phil nodded. “One bullet retrieval, coming up.” He went and got a styrofoam cup he'd noticed earlier in the cabinet and opened another beer, pouring it into the cup and handing it to Barton. “Might make the digging suck less,” he said. He swallowed the rest of his naked bottle and put it in the blue recycle box next to the trash, then went in the bathroom to see if the douchebag had tweezers here.

Barton drank his beer and held up the cup as far as he could without choking himself. “Another?”

“How old did you say you were?” Phil brought back a pair of tweezers and a couple of washclothes he'd wet in the sink, and went to grab another cup and a bottle of vodka from the kitchen. He grabbed a kitchen towel while he was there.

Barton snorted. “What, you're worried about contributing to the delinquency of a minor who spent every single one of his fuckin' formative years in a circus that moved every few weeks, ignored child labor laws, offered bribes of the unsavory kind to various county officials and inspectors, and was mostly made of dirt, fur, pancake makeup, and spit? Yeah, because _that's_ of concern.”

“Your file _does_ include much of that information. Also,” Phil put on his blandest face, “I am shocked and amazed that you turn out to have big words. Oh my.”

“Ooh, sarcasm. Suits you. Told you the whole no meaningless sex plan was a waste.”

Phil ignored the last part, except to make a mental note that Barton was obviously going to be capital-T-trouble. He did reply to the rest, “Good to know all my practice in front of the mirror has served me so well.”

Barton sighed. “Shot down twice by the same guy? Damn it. Fine. So the file says I was a carnie, but not my age?” Barton raised his eyebrows. “I'm twenty-one, course, bossman.” He jiggled the cup. “Next round's on you. Vodka's fine, too.”

Phil shook his head and poured another beer as he made a decision about what to do with Barton. “I'm not your boss. I'm the guy that's going to dig a bullet out of your arm and try not to do any nerve damage, then haul your ass to _my_ boss and tell him what you can do. He'll decide if your level of pain in the ass is one he's willing to live with.”

“You're bringing me in to spookville? Even though I shot at you?”

“Not spooks, but yes. That's the plan. Probably better than sending you back to the guys that were paying you with a bullet in you and no arrow in me, don't you think? Hold still.” Phil doused his pocketknife in the vodka then sliced into Barton's arm above and below the bullet hole.

Barton gulped his beer between cuts, but held still.

“This is still gonna suck,” Phil said. 

“No shit. Get it done.” He held still some more, and Phil fished out the bullet and cleaned the wound with soap and water, then tore up the towel for a bandage that would hold for a while. Barton watched him work, teeth gritted tight, then held out the cup again. “One for the road?”

Phil cleaned up the supplies, left an anonymous and terse note for the owner just in case (promising reimbursement; if SHIELD wouldn't pony up, he'd just bring it himself), and stashed all Barton's weapons, and his own, in his suit. Then he got them each one more beer--this one didn't count for the wall--and sat there drinking it slowly with his new associate. Asset. Whatever.

He was sixty-four bottles into the hundred in thirteen years and had no idea how to deal with the fact that this kid--who had to in fact be in his mid-twenties, for all he looked like a teenager, in order to remember Phil from a circus so long ago--and he thought he was about to make Marcus's life difficult again. Well, at least now he had real proof the job came with a _few_ perks. He tossed the rest of the bottles in the blue box and said, “Just remember, you said you'd only try to escape if you could get out clean. I will always come after you.”

“Always? Shit, didn't know the whole bullet-digging thing was some kind of commitment ceremony.”

Phil rolled his eyes. “So, you're not going to run. _Right?_ ”

Barton shrugged. “Sure.”

“That's not much of a promise.”

“I'm not a very promising person.”

“We'll see about that.” Phil snapped a handcuff onto the wrist of Barton's injured arm, then untied him and fastened the other cuff to himself. “I think you have a great deal of potential. Let's go.”

Barton quickly disguised a little tremor (caused by what, Phil didn't know, but at this time, it also didn't matter) at Phil's words by looking at the cuffs. “You had cuffs, but you zip-tied me?”

“Cuffs on a radiator are noisy. If you'd decided to rattle all over, the neighbors might've noticed.”

“Jesus, you're mister plans and decisions, aren't you? I thought maybe the fainting was a lucky accident, but--”

“No buts. I don't faint. Also, planning and deciding have usually served me well. Also, trying to get out with that shoulder will probably tear everything all open again, and just in case you hadn't noticed, the other end is attached to me, so I will know.”

Barton grinned. “Kay. Lead the way.”

And that was how Phil found himself drinking bottle sixty- _five_ , seven entire months later because he'd been busy overseeing the training program and qualifications of his pain in the ass asset for half a year, with his pain in the ass (and _definitely_ capital-T-trouble) asset. One mission down, one entry into the presence of deaditude endured (nearby deaths: none of their own), and one list of things the asset still needed to learn well underway.

It was kind of a long list, but Phil found himself looking forward to setting up the program, possibly at least in part because spending time with Barton was turning out to be... fun, maybe. And in any case, this mission had been hell and gone better than his own first mission had gone, and with Barton's aim and fairly uncanny sense about where the bad guys would be, maybe his hurtling pace toward a hundred was finally on a vehicle with functional brakes. Maybe.

\--

Naturally, bottle sixty-six was in his hand less than two weeks later, but he was hoping (a lot) that this was an anomaly. At two weeks a pop, thirty-four bottles was something like a year and a quarter, and that wasn't what he wanted to see.

\--

Bottle seventy was on the table in front of him on one of the tinier islands of Indonesia fifteen months after that (whew, four was way better than 34); Phil didn't drink more than a sip because at the time he was a little tied up with trying not to puke from the blow to the head or bleed anywhere that would be hard to clean up adequately. Barton, who'd crossed off a good two pages of list items, set it in front of him, watched him take that sip, then took the bottle and peeled the label free. “You should lie down.”

“Sleep when I'm dead,” Phil said. He tried to focus on the notes he was scribbling, although his fine-motor coordination and capacity to put words in a semantically-valid row both seemed to be pretty much completely fucked so for all he knew, maybe he was writing a love story about a giraffe hairdresser and her twin robot paramours.

Barton made a face. “Long ways off, man.” He folded the label and tucked it into a pocket of his vest, behind a power bar and the wound up coil of wire that was his weapon of last resort. “Or at least, it better be.”

“Doesn't feel like it.” Phil tried to write a couple more lines before he let him take the notebook and then let him turn the chair to pull his shoes off, and went to lie down. All right, fine, this was probably better than giraffe porn. Except that turning in giraffe porn would probably be worth it to watch Marcus's head explode.

Barton finished the report and filed it while Phil let an IV drip fluids into him at HQ medical, although he might have also left Phil a torn notebook page with a section going on floridly about attractive neck spots circled in red and a cartoon of himself with a giant question mark over his head; neither of them mentioned it again.

\--

Bottle seventy-one was definitely an anomaly; how many times was Barton going to go off-comms and recruit an international assassin? One, was how many, if Phil had anything to say about it; he wasn't willing to see Barton get into a fight like that again, for one thing, and for another, it turned out that recruited international assassins were still likely to go for the throat of the agent in charge, at least on principle. So yes, one international assassin, check, and Phil held an icepack on his collarbone and chugged the beer.

\--

Bottle eighty-two, Phil drank in Kiev after the loss of nearly his entire team, and he'd had never been more glad that Barton was off the roster, down with a hairline fracture in each ankle. He'd argued he could go, and was fine to climb shit, but with Romanov on a solo gig in Kuala Lumpur, and therefore unavailable to help Phil watch Barton's back, just no. Phil had overruled him and even though it probably made him a bad handler and a worse human, he couldn't help feeling the wash of relief as he realized not only had a truly disgusting fraction of Masters just spattered all over Phil's shoulder and back, but Chen was slumped over the edge of the rooftop where Barton would have been and Allenworth was down in an unsurvivable pool of blood on the ground just below. A moment later, the masked assassin took out the target Phil's team had been assigned to protect and then glanced past Phil and Marquez without so much as a spark of life in his eyes, and melted into thin air before any more backup was even en route. 

Clusterfuck, start to finish, and they didn't even do what they went for, damn it. But Barton was safe, and Phil couldn't bring himself to feel the least bit bad about that.

\--

Bottle eighty-seven, Phil drank sitting opposite Pepper Potts two hours after the explosive demise of Obadiah Stane while the two of them worked out the story Stark would tell. Miss Potts, relaxingly, was organized, creative, and thoughtful, and Phil enjoyed the conversation quite a bit, but he had the feeling even at the time that he probably should have just held onto this bottle until the press conference was over.

But all in all, letting, Barton, who had somehow become Clint in his head despite a number of fairly stern discussions with himself about appropriate asset-handler relationships, buy him a much more alcoholic, much more memory-fogging drink on the way home was probably better anyway. 

Fucking Stark.

\--

Bottle eighty-nine was one about which the less was said, the better, because everything about Budapest fell into that category. _Everything_. Any time a building came down as Barton smartmouthed his way down the fire escape literally a second ahead of the fucking thing falling off the bricks was shaping up to be a bad day in the first place, and then add in him losing his comm as everything crumbled while Romanov (who might be becoming just Natasha to match Barton's Clint, but not really in the same way because she virtually never crashed on the couch in his office or brought him bizarre gifts for no particular reason or left him thinking very impure thoughts about her equally-lethal body) had to kill a guy with his own car keys outside a grade school half a mile away and join the party at a sprint while Phil found them somewhere to hole up because the safehouse was compromised... nope, the less, the better, because that had only been phase _one_ of that particular shitshow, and if Phil hadn't been counting already, he'd have been certain the entire scenario took five years off his life.

When they got home, he parked Clint on the couch so he could keep an eye on that gash, and ordered in Thai for them so he could make sure Clint ate, and while Natasha could have joined them, she didn't. Phil pretended this was work, in the presence of his asset, which happened to include dinner, but that wasn't what it was, at least to him. 

He satisfied his conscience by not saying so out loud.

\--

Bottle ninety-three, it turned out, was even worse. Phil drank it slowly as he sat with ten stitches in his left shoulder and the wrist in a soft cast next to Barton's--fuckit, _Clint's_ \--bed while the monitors beeped reassuringly. That they kept beeping was probably the only thing keeping Phil from a colorful and profane tirade about intel and proficiencies and requals for everyone, because the only thing that had kept Clint from being the nearby dead guy this time when the intel was less data, more fantastic hyperbole possibly imagined by squids on LSD, and when the guy who was watching his back in the field had tripped over a gum wrapper on his way into position and gotten himself shot for his trouble? was the fact that he'd snagged a not-quite-gargoyle protrusion on an open pocket on his tac suit as he fell, unconscious and bleeding, from the fifty-story roof. The pocket had torn almost immediately, but _some_ how the snag had cause just enough of a change of vector to land Clint on the only balcony on the forty-fifth floor that wasn't screened. Against all possible reason and almost certainly exhausting the lifetime luck supply of everyone on the op.

His right knee was fucked up, two previous ribs that were now sharp confetti in there had punched holes in thankfully the same lung, there were deep-tissue bruises and assorted cracks, gashes, scrapes, and fractures down the entire left side of his body, and the head wound that had taken him out in the first place had been joined with a new whack on the brick side of the building. And Phil had pretty much stopped breathing as he watched from the ground and tried to figure out which room which floor shit shit shit don't bleed out before I get there.

Phil was positive he was not supposed to have beer in medical, but his giveafuck quotient was far into the negative and he wasn't sure he could sit here while Clint was this broken without honoring the rules of the song they'd (what the fuck, his life) bonded over in the first place. He was clear on how remaining in the chair pretty much 24/7 meant he was way too fucking attached to his asset, but it turned out his giveafuck (honestly, they ought to just codify the concept. GAF number, maybe) was way down in that regard, too, because there was just no fucking way he was going to let go of Clint's hand and leave any time soon. It didn't matter whether his ridiculous, possibly requited, crush was ever going anywhere.

Except.

When Clint woke, four days later, first he asked for a fracture count (too fucking many, was Phil's first answer, but then he enumerated them anyway), and then after a pause to grumble about the incipient PT that was definitely going to shape the end of his hospital time for that many fucking breaks, he asked what number that was for Phil, and Phil sighed and told him. Clint shook his head, following with a wince but saying never the less, “Told ya to cool it off, bossman. I'm sure I said that the first time we met.”

“You did.”

“And I'm the one people think don't fucking follow directions?” His voice was raspy, but his gaze was pretty clear, so despite the painkillers, Phil thought that probably this counted as an actual conversation. 

“I'm about eighty percent sure the command structure requires you to follow my orders, but not the reverse.”

“Command schmommand. Quit trying to get snuggly with the reaper, man” Clint held up his hand, which Phil clasped briefly, their thumbs wrapped around each other in the grip that fell between a handshake and a hand _hold_ , and closed his eyes. “Seriously. I have a vested interest in you not dying. We got stuff to get to, and you can't go dying before I man up and tell you all the things I... Hey, did they give me morphine? I fucking hate morphine. Makes me say things I meant not to. God.” And then he went back to sleep. Phil watched him for a few minutes, then went back to working through files on his tablet. Clint's question had made him even more acutely aware than he already was that ninety-three was damn close to a hundred, and sure, he didn't quite actually believe his own fucking superstition, but... what if he did?

Maybe it was time to try to keep himself out of the field and in the van a little more. Just a little. It was legitimate. Ish. After all, he was in his mid-forties (all right, coming up on _late_ forties, but who was counting?), and he knew some of his reflexes were slowing, just a little. He could do as many pushups as he had when he was twenty-one, but it took a little longer and when he really pushed, well, recovery was a bitch. 

So as long as he was working through files, he opened up a form or two for ...it wasn't that he really wanted reassignment. He meant to still lead teams, both because it was way more fun than sitting around in the van and because he didn't like to be the kind of leader who sent the minions into harm's way but refused to risk his own skin.

But... whatever Clint had just managed to fight the morphine and not say, Phil was long past the point at which he'd become pretty sure he had a vested interest, too, and he wanted to learn what, exactly, Clint had in mind.

Well, or he wanted to just jump him, but probably that wasn't a good idea without a clear signal from the guy in the less-power-holding position in the team, so instead he was going to have to wait. Some more. At least he had plenty of practice.

He went back to the forms directory and scrolled through the list, thinking about whether another stint in ops would drive him crazy, or whether he wanted to tolerate another go-round as a trainer of entry-level junior agents.

Or he could stay in the field and see how long he could drag out seven bottles with no one as concerned as Clint watching his six, right?

Clint stirred and mumbled, nothing coherent except that Phil thought he probably heard his own name in the midst of an impatient whine, then stilled again. Phil took a deep breath and opened the request for a rotation as a trainer. 

Approval came back, signed off on by Marcus (Nick. He was definitely going to learn to call him Nick, even in his own head) himself, in less than fifteen minutes, and Phil set the tablet down and leaned back to rest his eyes for a few minutes. He had an appointment in a couple of hours for a recheck of the wrist, but until then, he figured he'd just wait and see if Clint woke up again and wanted to say anything more.

When Clint checked out a couple of days later, Phil was in a meeting about his updated role and Natasha came by to spring him instead; when Phil went by his quarters that evening he carefully didn't mention anything about the morphine-induced conversation, and certainly didn't tell Clint he was thinking of pulling out of the field except when Clint was in it.

Not that he hadn't already pretty much filed the paperwork to do exactly that, and not that Clint didn't look sidelong at him as he noticed the schedule, but still, apparently neither of them was ready to take their partnership into personal territory, so keeping each other alive was going to have to do. Thirteen weeks later, in a desert rainstorm, they were still working the same plan, and neither of them had made a move to change it.

Although maybe, just maybe, the way they silently didn't share quarters on ops any more if there was any kind of choice--too hard, Phil thought, and he figured Clint thought the same--meant something was going to have to give.

\--

Bottle ninety-eight was just fucking _stupid_. Ninety-eight, so effectively no more room to maneuver, and he was fucking _being careful_ these days, and damn it. Last day of a fucking training exercise before Clint was supposed to head out to a long-term stint at Pegasus and Phil was scheduled to head back to base to keep an eye on (what the fuck) Captain America while he thawed, which was interrupted by a couple of low-level, low-priority AIM-wannabe assholes, and Rivera and Davenport lost their heads and opened fire earlier than they should, not only taking bait when they (Rivera, mostly) should have waited for confirmation, but also giving away position without maximizing return.

Well, and then Rivera lost his head, literally, in return, which, goddammit, he'd been shaping up to be a decent agent, and also, every time Phil lost an agent was another bad fucking day, of course. 

Three hours later, Clint finished handling the cleanup of the wannabes and found Phil in the mess doing the paperwork with one hand and picking at the edge of his label with his other, wondering, if he didn't peel it entirely, maybe could it just not count? But Rivera had been two feet behind Phil and six inches to the left when it happened; that definitely made the case for bottle 98.

“You still suck at cooling it off, boss,” Clint said as he straddled the other chair backward and crossed his arms over the back.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “Not as bad as Rivera sucked at shooting in the right direction, more's the pity.”

Clint shrugged. “He was an okay guy. Naiya's pretty fucked up, by the way.”

Phil nodded. Rivera had been paired with Davenport throughout their training, and if memory served, Rivera was the first out of their squad to go down. That was also always a bad fucking day. “She gonna make it?” He wasn't especially concerned she'd do anything drastic in the sense of hurting herself, but sometimes people were surprising, and either way pretty often junior agents found this to be the moment they realized this wasn't the life for them. Phil had high hopes for Davenport in the long run--she was smart as hell, an utter machine (in training, at least) with hand to hand, and, crucially, willing to tell anyone, up to and including Nick Fury, when she had an issue with an op without being the kind of smartass that fucked up team unity or operational security. He really hoped she would stay.

“Think so,” Clint said. "Wanda Jackson is with her until medical clears her, and in the middle of hating herself she's also already making noises about how to make sure this doesn't happen next time.” 

Phil added those details to her file and sent it off to psych, then went back to the more general after-action report.

“How about you? You okay?” Clint tilted his head down to catch Phil's eye.

“Fine. Didn't even take any damage to my suit.” Phil didn't mention the bullet that had planted into the wall a foot behind him after whizzing past his head by what he figured was probably less than an inch.

“Not really what I was asking.”

Phil pursed his lips. “I know.”

Clint stood, glanced over at the form on Phil's screen, and briskly tapped at the save button, then turned to go. “C'mon. Nat sent me a new version of Trivial Pursuit for you to wipe the floor with me with.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Before Agent Rivera is even--”

“Phil. I don't know if you know, but our job involves one-point-five metric fucktons of peril and a daily portion of danger along with a heaping scoop of destruction and--I know you know this part--a couple reams of paper a head, three on Tuesdays. Yeah, today was shit, but just. I could use a little distraction and I'm betting you could, too. Is everything that needs to be filed tonight filed?”

Phil ignored the surge of interest in his body at the notion of himself and Clint _distracting_ one another, because that wasn't what they were doing. Not yet. Not... damn it. He shrugged. “Yes.”

“Then please, can we take this out of the office? It's even psychologically valid as a response to this kind of shit. Plus, we might not see each other again for a while and you know I'll memorize the cards if I get bored in New Mexico, so it's probably your only chance for wiping.” 

Phil powered down his tablet. “Fine. But if this turns out to be _Trivial Pursuit: Carnivals and State Fairs Edition_ I reserve the right to award myself bonus points as I see fit.”

Clint shook his head. “Did I get bonus points when it was the Book Lover's Edition? No, I did not.”

“Yes, because you read.”

“And you go to carnivals. Occasionally. Or at least once.” Clint stuck out his tongue, but Phil took off his jacket and pulled on a sweater instead, then followed him to his quarters and let himself be distracted. Although he did check his phone after every turn, just in case.

It was not, in fact, the Carnivals and State Fairs edition, if such a thing even existed, but its leisure categories were so heavily seeded with Road Side Americana Phil thought probably Natasha had chosen it specifically to entertain Clint anyway. He could live with that. 

“So, Pegasus,” he said, flipping the die and landing on sports and games.

“Yeah, just babysitting.”

Phil knew that; he'd seen the file and it wasn't as though there was likely to be any kind of armed resistance mounted by a shiny blue cube, right? It had done horrible things in the hands of the Red Skull, sure, but guns didn't kill people; _people_ killed people. With guns, though, and it wasn't like Phil wasn't fairly familiar with the history of the blue cube; it had certainly made for some very nasty guns back in the day. Something about the operation made his skin crawl, but he didn't have anything specific to object to, so he hadn't said anything to Nick and he wasn't going to say anything now. Just. “Well, be careful.”

Clint snorted and drew a card to ask his question. “Yeah, it's my specialty, babe.”

“Babe?”

Clint shrugged. “Dude. Sir. O captain my captain.”

Phil grimaced. “Fine. Babe is the least awful of those, in the context of game night. Don't bring it in the field, though.”

“Duh.” Clint read out the question, gave Phil all of three seconds to dredge up the answer he didn't have, then picked up the die.

“Nope,” Phil said, holding out his hand. “Not a chance.” Clint already had four wedges, and as usual, he was 'unusually lucky' with his rolls, so Phil had taken over all rolling tasks.

Clint sighed and handed it over, then moved 5 spaces while the damn thing was in the air, predicting the fall.

“Showoff.”

“For which you love me, sir.”

Phil shrugged a little. “There is that.” He drew his card and asked Clint about--oh for fuck's sake--about the claim to fame of Horace Ford. He rolled again even while Clint was answering.

“So, 98,” Clint said casually, several turns later. “One more til we fight again, huh?”

Phil stilled. “Will we?”

“Dunno. Might, if you don't stop flinging yourself headlong into danger and all. Ninety- _eight_ , Phil.”

“Hey, half of those, _at least_ half, were never my fault.”

“And yet.” Clint landed on the wedge square again and answered his question, beating Phil by a hair, and dumped out the little triangles into his palm. He moved them around with his finger. “You ever think what you're gonna do when you retire?”

Phil arched a brow. “Retire? You think guys like us ever--”

“Shut up. I really... shut up, and seriously, ninety-eight, Phil. No wiggle room at all, and I'm not going to be okay when, you know.”

“ _You're_ not?” Phil made it a joke, or tried, but then he shook his head. “Clint, I know, but this is the job. Maybe I--at the risk of sounding as though I definitely expect that on my hundredth brush with death, I will meet it--maybe I counted some that weren't really that bad. I mean, I was in my twenties some of the time, and maybe I was just shitting my pants needlessly, you know?”

“Phil Coulson doesn't shit his pants,” Clint said. “But I'll accept that theory because I like it better than the alternative. Either way, don't you think we've been dancing around long enough?”

“Around what, Clint?” Phil knew what, but he still needed Clint to tell him, on purpose, so he kept his voice level and light and raised his eyebrows as he asked.

Clint rolled his eyes and put away the game pieces while Phil sat and drank his uncounted beer. Then he came back and scooted the table out of the way, holding out his hand to pull Phil upright. “Around how we really hate being separated? Around how I just told you if you go and fucking eat it I will not be okay, possibly ever? Around how I spend more time with you than I do alone, including the hours allocated to sleeping, pissing, and jerking off?”

Phil swallowed. “...You allocate time for jer--”

“Yeah, because you don't. It's probably on the schedule in your head for a nice adequate but ungreedy three times a week?”

Phil snorted as he came upright (and no, for the record, _because_ he and Clint spent more time together than apart, it was a little more than that). “And your proposition is?”

“That we stop dancing.”

“Damn. I was hoping for a waltz at Stark's next--”

“Phil.” Clint stepped in closer. “One, Stark is a jackass and I'm pretty sure he's never inviting me to anything. Two, shut up and kiss me.” He didn't actually wait for Phil to comply before leaning in and taking the matter out of Phil's hands by kissing _him_ , which wasn't that surprising because Clint wasn't much for patience in any context other than waiting for a target--Phil considered for a moment that in a sense he was a target here, but then he stopped thinking entirely and just went with kissing. 

Clint took the acquiescence for permission to take things further and shoved his fingers into Phil's hair, walking them back toward his bedroom, only pausing at the door. He pulled back there. “Yes?”

“What?” Phil tried to parse the question, but as he'd long suspected might happen, once he'd started kissing Clint, he didn't want to stop, and his ability to focus on anything else was severely compromised. He was going to have to get out of the field entirely if this was how this was going to work.

Which, he had to admit, was probably likely to delay getting to 100.

“Yes?” Clint asked again. He pointed between the two of them and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the bed. “You're the one who loves rules, man. I'm so down with this it's ridiculous, but I don't want you to hate me in the morning.”

“I don't, and can't, hate you.” Phil shook his head. “And I'm having a really hard time, right this minute, feeling any love at all for the rules.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. No. I still like rules, but one of mine was that this had to start with you, and it did, so the rest of them can just fuck off.”

Clint grinned. “They can, can they?”

“Far off.” Phil crowded Clint back to the bed and followed him down onto it. “Like, Tahiti far.”

“Tahiti? Isn't that the codename--”

“Shut up. Just because the specific name came to mind because, anyway, it's far, and it doesn't matter because really we could just be--yes, that.” Clint had Phil's shirts shoved up and the button of his waistband undone, and Phil didn't bother explaining further, instead just tugging Clint's t-shirt out of his jeans and pushing his hands up under the cotton, thumbs and fingertips brushing over warm skin and the dozens of small (and six, that Phil knew of, larger) scars and bumps there as he straddled Clint's thighs and sat upright. Clint groaned and watched him skate his fingers down to unbutton his jeans, then curl down to kiss the bared skin over taut muscles beneath and between Clint's ribs.

“Jesus. Okay, no fair.”

Phil looked up. “What, you were hoping we'd have sex with no kissing? Because if so, you started off on the wrong—oof!” He grunted as Clint flipped them, then laughed as Clint yanked his shirt the rest of the way open, sending buttons flying, and rucked his undershirt up to his nipples. “I'm going to have to borrow something to go home in,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever, anything and everything related to tomorrow morning's wardrobe is so low on my list of concerns right now it needs a periscope to see us.” Clint hadn't bothered to change the fact that his knees were inside Phil's so he dropped down onto his elbows and swiped his tongue across one nipple. “You?”

Phil gasped. “Yep, periscope is good.” He tugged at the back of Clint's shirt, pulling it up over his head and taking advantage of the fact that at some point he needed to break contact to breathe, and chucked the shirt off to one side. “Get up here.” 

Clint grinned and shuffled forward, opening his lips against Phil's and letting Phil slide his tongue in as Clint found a way (magic? Magic was possible because what the fuck how were they this naked) to get rid of pants and shoes without ever breaking the kiss. Phil groaned as he finally moved away, though not very far; Clint kissed his way down Phil's chin and jaw and went back to work on a nipple as his fingers found Phil's cock and gave a gentle squeeze.

Phil reached to do the same, but Clint was moving backwards now, sucking heated wet pink spots into the flesh of Phil's belly until his chin was level with his fingers, and then before Phil managed to put his brain back together enough to offer any kind of suggestion or comment, Clint was sucking him down, slurping and bobbing his head with the kind of enthusiasm that confirmed he'd been wanting to do this for a while, and by then, Phil couldn't muster anything but a choked _ngggh_ and a solid grip of Clint's short hair in his fingers. He managed to keep from using that grip to direct the action, but barely, and then Clint reached up with one hand and intertwined their fingers, and there was no real reason for _that_ to be the thing that made Phil completely lose all sense of pace and patience, thrusting into Clint's mouth and listening to his own harsh panting, but it was. He gripped Clint's hand and let Clint do whatever he wanted, and quickly, very quickly, he was grunting and coming, his free hand having moved to Clint's shoulder to grip fingerprint marks into the muscle there, and then Clint was grinning lazily up at him, mouth still loosely around Phil's softening cock. He moved a little to the right, nudged a little, and licked his lips. “So, now?”

“Now, what?” Phil asked. “Now your turn? Because yes.”

Clint shook his head, nose crinkling in almost a giggle. “No, I mean, before I asked, 'you?' and I was just wondering how you were feeling about wardrobe issues now. Although your interpretation is valid, too.”

“Oh, well good. I would hate to find I was not valid in my interpretation of sex. Wardrobe can go with the rules.”

Clint laughed again and crawled forward, landing chest to chest with Phil, his cock hard and heavy against Phil's inner thigh. “Perfect. Can I kiss you?”

Phil pretended to think about it for a second, then rolled his eyes. “Yes. Yes, you can kiss me, although still, we have to figure out how to deal with this in the field--no, wait, that's a rule. Fuck it. Kiss me.” He paused. “And make it good. Tomorrow I have to go watch Captain America sleep.”

“Oh, is this a competition?”

“If you'll find it motivating,” Phil said. He chuckled. “But mostly what I meant was, right now, we have tonight. Make it count.”

Clint sat up and straddled Phil's thighs, then offered a hand to lever Phil up too, pulling his sweater and (destroyed) shirt off his shoulders before pushing him back down and following up with that kiss. “You got it,” he murmured against Phil's lips.

\--

Bottle ninety-nine wasn't actually a beer, but that was because the carrier didn't stock it. However, with Clint down, a hundred agents buried in rubble that Phil had felt crashing down around him as he ran for all he was worth for the chopper, and the heavy awareness that this, this was his heart being broken in his chest as he downloaded the materials to take to Stark (and tried to shove all the feelings that had no place in the field, none, into a box in his head and lock the damn thing tight), he had no choice but to honor the tradition with the first bottled beverage he came across (Eight ounces of water. Close enough). 

He hoped Natasha could bring Banner in, because they had some vengeance to serve, and even without enough data to see the big picture, Phil already knew it was going to be ugly.

\--

Bottle 100 wasn't a beer either, but Phil snagged another little water bottle on his way to the weapons locker. He also grabbed a sharpie and scrawled “BEER” across the label, then shoved it in his empty jacket pocket.

It wasn't that he was heading off to die; it was that Maggie had been right so far, and damn it, she was going to be right again, so he might as well try to take the bastard with him. Marcus would know what the bottle was, and so would Natasha.

Or, he'd survive and drink a bottle of water on his way back to the bridge. That would be okay too, as long as he didn't think about Clint. He picked up the gun and headed for the cage, wondering what, exactly, one said to a god one meant to kill.

\--

 _One hundred times you will face death. Each of those times, someone close to you will meet it when you do not. On the hundredth time, your heart will be broken, and you will fall._ Phil heard the words as Marcus came around the corner and crouched, and he grinned, or tried. “He rabbited,” he said. 

Marcus scowled and ordered him not to die, but Phil shook his head and pawed at his pocket roughly. “Clocking out,” he murmured. The lights were strangely bright, and Marcus was a blur, and Clint... Clint was gone anyway. No reason to start doubting Maggie now.

\--

Phil noticed, before it occurred to him to open his eyes, that he wasn't alone in the room. Well, maybe the coroner? Wait.

He also noticed that he apparently wasn't dead any more (What the fuck? He was pretty sure dead was a permanent state of affairs).

That his chest hurt.

That his back hurt.

That stabbing was painful and messy, and was not an experience he wanted to have again. Well, no, that was a memory, not something he noticed, but it was still true.

That someone was humming that damned song. Someone who sounded exactly like Clint. Which, there was also a memory, from the time shortly before he died, and it suggested this was impossible, so maybe he really _was_ still dead. 

Heaven? Was that a thing? And they were both there? Because Phil was pretty sure he hadn't complied with all the terms and conditions for entry to heaven. Maybe they were ghosts. He'd never really looked good in the transparent palette. 

He started to laugh, then gasped because really, that didn't feel very good. Probably he would learn more if he returned to the notion of opening his eyes.

“Hey, Phil? You 'wake yet?” The room darkened, or there was a shadow, and Phil cracked open his eyes to see Clint leaning over him. “Hey. Hi, you.”

“'mdead,” Phil muttered. 

“Yep, you were. By the way, you do that shit again and I will find a fucking way to seek retribution.” Clint pushed a button near the head of the bed. “He's up.” He turned back to Phil. “Brought your collection. Thinking of burning 'em.” He held up a handful of labels and mashed cans. “Since you won't need 'em any more.”

Phil shook his head, then regretted it. “Still nee'em.”

“Oh?”

“How we meet?” Phil asked.

Clint tilted his head. “You shot me, is how.”

“Anthen I hadda beer. An you...”

“Remembered you. Yeah, I know. And you counted to 100 and you fell.”

“Heartw's brokn.” Phil closed his eyes, but Clint's hand came to grasp his. 

“Yeah, babe. Mine too. But it's better now.”

“Be...r now,” Phil agreed. He heard the door open, but ignored the conversation between Clint and whoever had just come in as he went back to sleep.

When he woke, Clint was still there, dozing in the chair by the bed, hair greasy now, and chin stubbled. Phil frowned. “Hey,” he said.

Clint's eyes popped open. “Hey.”

“You look like shit.”

“Believe it or not,” Clint said, pulling himself upright, “so do you.”

“My excuse is better.”

“Gotta agree with you there, sir.” Clint bent and kissed Phil's lips. “We can work on it together, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, right now that means a nurse gives you a spongebath while I go get a shower, but if you work really hard at PT...”

“I'll get another spongebath?”

Clint laughed. “Yeah, but eventually, we can get to that joint shower I seem to remember you promised me a few weeks ago.”

“Weeks?”

“Uh, yeah. Recovering from being dead is apparently a complex process requiring a lot of energy and time.” Clint shrugged. “But I got time. Your clock ran out, and you're still here, so I got all the time in the world.”

Phil thought about that, then said, “Apparently, now, so do I.” He beckoned Clint back down for another kiss and rain his fingers through his hair. “Now, go shower, and then we can go on a date. I warn you, the date will be in this room, and is likely to involve a dinner of jello and overcooked vegetables...”

“Sounds perfect.” Clint pecked him on the lips one more time and stepped back. “Want me to sneak you in a beer? That hundredth time...”

Phil shook his head. “Nope. Game over. Now, it's just us. Hurry back.”

“Will do.”


End file.
